1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a position recognition technology of a moving apparatus, and more particularly, to a moving apparatus providing a position correction function by which accurate position recognition can be performed even when the moving apparatus is in an abnormal movement state, such as collision with an obstacle, slipping, passing an obstacle and kidnapping, which can occur when a moving apparatus, such as a cleaning robot, moves, and a method and medium of correcting a position.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, robots have been developed for industrial purposes and have been used for factory automation or used to perform jobs that replace human labor in extreme environments that that are unfavorable to human beings. With applications in the recent sophisticated space development industry, the robot engineering field has been continuously developed and more recently, even human-friendly home robots have been developed. In addition, replacing medical equipment, robots can be inserted into the living body of a human being, and used to treat small organs of the body that cannot be treated by conventional medical equipment. This rapid development has highlighted the robot engineering field as a high technology field to emerge, following the Internet led information revolution and the currently widespread biotechnology field.
With regard to robot engineering, home robots have played a major role in the expansion of the conventional robot engineering field, which centered on the heavy industry field and was limited to industrial robots, to light industry oriented robot engineering. A leading example is a cleaning robot. Cleaning robots are generally composed of a driving unit for movement, a cleaning unit for cleaning, and a monitoring unit for sensing obstacles in all directions.
Here, the moving cleaning robot travels in such a manner that, by using the monitoring unit in a limited area, if an obstacle appears, the moving robot changes its direction of movement, or the moving robot calculates its position by using a predetermined unit, and identifies an object area to be cleaned, and then, moves along an optimum path so that the cleaning time and energy consumption can be reduced.
Thus, in moving apparatuses traveling in a predetermined area, including the recent moving robots, a technology for identifying the position of the apparatus, that is, for precisely recognizing the position of the apparatus is essentially required.
However, in the case of an encoder used in the conventional technology for recognizing the position of a robot, as the traveling time increases, position errors can accumulate by, for example, a slip phenomenon. In particular, the position error can be worsened by collision with an obstacle, or due to a movement to avoid an obstacle, and when the robot passes a low obstacle, such as a threshold. As another example of the conventional technology for identifying the position of the robot, a gyroscope may be used. However, the use of the gyroscope also involves accumulation of position errors when the gyroscope rotates in a situation the robot passes a low obstacle. Also, in the case of so-called kidnapping in which the position of the moving robot is changed by a person, the robot may not be able to recognize its position.